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A Asia Pacific State of the Data Center report 2008, released by Symantec, says that Asian IT companies are making steps to reduce data center costs through automation, server consolidation, and virtualization initiatives. The survey also found that the employees in most data centers are not knowledgeable enough, hardware is underutilized, and disaster recovery plans in many data centers were out of date.

A summary of the results of the Asian report has been published in ZDnet Asia.

Suzie Tan, Symantec's managing director for Malaysia says for ZDnet that key initiatives data centers were pursuing to "do more with less" included automation of routine tasks, as indicated by 47% of respondents, server virtualization/consolidation (43%) and reducing data center complexity (40%).

The respondents in the Symantec poll said that their data center servers were operating at just 65% of capacity in 2008, down from 70% in 2007, while data center storage utilization was lower at 60%.

Symantec recommends to IT businesses which want to achieve greater efficiencies and cost savings to use heterogeneous software. According to the company this will allow data center managers to achieve more with limited resources by utilizing existing server and storage resources, freeing up IT staff and protecting and managing data, servers and applications with a single platform. Symantec also recommends:

- The usage of green IT, or software to reduce energy consumption and increase space utilization by providing server and storage efficiencies

- A comprehensive data protection strategy that supports the broadest set of disk, tape and virtual library vendors

The Asian report is based on interviews with data center employees in 414 companies in Japan, China, India, South Korea, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. It has been conducted in September and October 2008.

The release of Windows Server 2008 made possible for many web hosting providers to take advantage of the new features that offered. One of them is it allowed them to to offer VPS Hosting based on Windows Server 2008 powered servers. This type of virtual private servers are based on the new Hyper-V virtualization technology platform.

Hyper-V is a very serious competitor of Virtuozzo for Windows that has been used for Windows powered VPS for years. Now with the release of new Hyper-V many web hosts may decide to switch from Virtuozzo to the new Microsoft virtualization technology in order to cut costs. The Windows makes offers Hyper-V for "free" with Windows OS license.

This means that Windows Server 2008 provides vps hosting providers with something more than virtualization technology. Microsoft claims to provide a reliable platform that enables data storage companies easy to create and manage virtual private servers. and to offer features such as IIS.

Many hosting industry analysts expect Windows VPS hosting providers to lower prices after the deployment of Hyper-V with the new Windows Server 2008.

How to use Hyper-V?

As we mentioned above, Hyper-V makes possible for web hosts to offer a new VPS hosting platform. Hyper-V supports for many Windows OS and this allows hosting companies to offer VPS based on both Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008.

Hyper-V is a very new and up-to-date software application which means that it is more likely to work with the more recent versions of certain OS. This means that that web hosts can use of Windows Server 2008.

The main advantage of virtualization technologies is that they help small businesses to lower costs for infrastructure, hardware, power and cooling. At the same time the system performance of a virtualized infrastructure may less effective than consumers expect. It is the same for costs. They might not be cut as much as It managers expect. The most important thing in process of managing a virtual infrastructure is businesses to improve the performance of their applications.

According to Bojan Simic, an analyst at research firm Aberdeen the management of virtual infrastructures is difficult because there is a lack of tools which enable companies to monitor and analyze virtual environments.

Aberdeen conducted a survey among 137 enterprises in December 2008 which found that IT companies manage much better their business-critical applications in physical environment than in virtualized one.

"If organizations don't have capabilities in place for the effective management of application performance, some of the benefits of virtualization could diminish," Simic said for Internet News.

The analytical agency predicts that some businesses may be unsatisfied of their investment in virtual infrastructure if they haven't calculated very precisely the results that the virtualization technologies can bring, especially in reducing data center costs and improving efficiency and utilization.

The study also found that keeping business-critical applications at peak performance may be harder in virtual environments. For example, when using tools to manage business-critical applications in physical environments, 62% of the companies participated to the survey reported improved mean time between repairs (MTBR). That figure dropped to 32% in the virtualized environment.

Aberdeen's analysts had an 85% success rate in identifying performance issues before they impacted end users, but only in setups that relied on a physical environment. The rate for virtual environments was 37%. 67% of participants say they have seen an improved application response times when managing business-critical applications in the physical environment, while the figure for virtualized environments was 39%.